Chicken People…the Movie

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It gets dark here in Michigan around 5:30 now. The forced winter hibernation has begun. Zach and I have been scrambling after he gets home from work to take advantage of the waning daylight hours to rush through outdoor projects before the sun sets. Last night we worked on goat fencing with the Jeep headlights shining for light.

Spending more time indoors means we inevitably watch more television. There I said it. I publicly admit to watching TV. Sometimes I feel like in the outdoorsy-crunchy-organic circles that admitting that you own a television is like admitting that you’re a crack addict. Like I should be reading Tolstoy or learning french, or playing the cello. ANYTHING but TV! It reminds me of the Jim Gaffigan skit about hiding the fact that we eat at McDonalds. “They sell 6 billion hamburgers a day,….. I think everyone’s lying.”

Actually, and here’s my disclaimer, we don’t watch television. We haven’t had a television in over 7 years, but we watch Youtube videos or Netflix, or we rent movies from Amazon Prime on our computer screen, which is exactly what we did last night.

For the past couple months I’ve been following the release of a documentary called Chicken People on CMT. We don’t have cable, so I’ve been trying to figure out where I could rent it/watch it. I just found out that you can rent it on Amazon. So we did, and it was great! Watch the trailer below!

The documentary follows three “Chicken People” in their journey to bring their best chickens to show. “It’s like the Westminster of chickens.” This is my FAVORITE part of chicken keeping. It has been my goal for he past 5 years to really narrow down on a breed, raise them to the standard and take them to show.

The movie reminded me of one of my favorite satires by Christopher Guest “Best in Show”. Starring Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara. “Best in Show” follows a collection of dog breeders to a dog show and pokes fun of the obsessive nature of “dog people”. It’s hilarious!!!

I had to keep reminding myself that “Chicken People” wasn’t a satire. In fact it was beautifully filmed, but had just enough wit and good natured, poke-fun humor to make it funny. I mean, most of us here are chicken people. We’re a little weird, we know that about ourselves right?

It was especially good timing as The Ohio National Poultry Show was just this past weekend. For almost a year I’ve been planning on making the trip to Ohio to see the amazing spectacle of almost 6000 of the best chickens the country has to offer. I even had a breeder lined up to buy some show quality Buff Orpingtons. But I just gave birth to our first child, so I had to cancel the trip.

While I’m thrilled to be mother for the first time, I was really bummed about not being able to go to Ohio. Every time an update about the show would come through my Facebook news-feed, I’d get a little disappointed.

So watching this movie was the perfect thing to get me through until I can visit in person next year.

If you’re interested in chicken shows then be sure to tune in on Wednesday, November 23 on CMT or the film is also available to rent through Amazon Prime.